Tribute to Jake

Hi, I'm Jessica Samuels, member of the engineering operations team and this is your Curiosity rover update.

Last week, we completed our second round of vehicle health checkouts. This was primarily targeted on the robotic arm and the hardware at the end of the robotic arm called the turret.

This included different instruments and the sample processing hardware and sample acquisitioning hardware.

Our arm checkout activity was in preparation for our first contact science. This is an exciting time for the robotic arm team and the mission as a whole as we will do our first placement of an instrument on a target called "Jake Matijevic."

Our target was named specifically for our surface operations team chief engineer, who unfortunately passed shortly after landing. The target Matijevic has been selected to cross calibrate two of our instruments on the rover. The alpha particle X-ray spectrometer, which resides on the end of the robotic arm, and the ChemCam instrument, which resides on top of the remote sensing mast.

Recently we completed a Mastcam panorama of a ridge, which will give us a great vantage point of the Glenelg target area.

A few sols ago we completed a interesting campaign where we actually acquired images of the Martian moons, Phobos and Deimos, transiting across the sun.